If someone introduced themselves to you at a party as a programme manager or
project manager, you wouldn’t necessarily assume that they were handling
vast sums of money

The sort of image that would flutter into your head would be a man in a suit going round a building site in a hard hat and yellow jacket, chivvying his workmen to get on with the job and not keep stopping for cups of tea.

Well, you could be wrong. At the Said Business School in Oxford, the MSc in Major Programme Management is targeted at people responsible, or potentially responsible, for budgets measured in billions of pounds. There are more of them out there than you would think.

"Take China alone," says course director Dr Paul Chapman. "When David Cameron and a team of businessmen visited there recently, they found that 25 new airports were being built. Whoever is in charge of building every one of those airports, in fact every terminal at those airports, will be responsible for a £1billion-plus project."

Will they be up to the job? And how can they be best prepared for the formidable challenges ahead? Given the chequered history of major building projects – remember the teething problems at Heathrow's Terminal 5? It is not surprising that top business schools like the Said are starting to tailor programmes for very big spenders indeed.

"Someone running a very large programme is more like a CEO than a traditional project manager, and they need to have the leadership qualities of a CEO," says Chapman. "It is time that simple fact of business life was more widely realised."

The first cohort of students on the MSc in Major Programme Management course, who have just completed their studies, numbered 33, the second 53 – an increase of more than 50 cent. About half the students are from the UK. The others come from far and wide. North America, South Africa, Australia...

Mainly they come from the private sector, but £1 billion-plus programmes are certainly not a private sector monopoly. One Said student worked for the International Atomic Energy Authority. Others have come from high-spending London boroughs.

With a median age of around forty, the students all have first degrees, or the equivalent, and about a third already have MBAs. But they need the additional management know-how that Said can give them.

The two-year course is designed to enable them to continue their careers uninterrupted, while devoting about ten hours a week to developing the intellectual and financial skills needed to manage. The course consists of eight taught courses, each one requiring an intensive four-day programme in Oxford, and a 10,000-word dissertation – perhaps, though not necessarily, focussing on issues specific to their own workplaces.

"Every student is different, with different major spending programmes for which they need to prepare," says Chapman. "But they are not doing their studies in isolation. Each student has a tutor at an Oxford college as a mentor. They also form contacts will fellow students that span the globe – from Sydney to Santiago, in the case of two of our students. And we learn from them. We have recently had to tweak our course as a result of input from a student who was working on a major development programme in Afghanistan."

If the Said programme specifically targets big spenders, there are management courses geared to just about every manager in every sector of the economy, with new courses becoming available every year and more and more universities and business schools recognising that this is a market they should try to tap.

For Jo Downing, a clinical coding manager at King's Hospital in London, a MA in Management Studies from Kingston University in Surrey was just the fillip she needed in her NHS career. She already had a degree in business studies and modern languages, but despite more than ten years of hands-on experience of hospital management, realised that a masters degree offered the likeliest route to future promotion. Since qualifying earlier this year, she has already applied for a position two grades above her current job.

"There is a big drive within the NHS to improve efficiency and effectiveness," says Downing. "King's Hospital recognised that I would be more valuable to them if I was better qualified, so I received a modicum of financial help with the funding for the course. I also got study leave when appropriate."

The Kingston course took three years to complete and consisted of a postgraduate diploma followed by a dissertation. Attendance at the university was necessary about once a month, which was not a problem for Downing, who lived in the vicinity. But many of her fellow students came from much further afield. Some worked in the private sector, while others worked for local government, the NHS or other public bodies.

"It was quite a while since my days as a full-time university student, and it took a while to pick up the habits of study again," says Downing. "But Kingston was good at helping us structure our studies and get the most out of individual assignments. Its many online resources also made it easy to study at home at the weekends."

If at one level she was going back to school, she was also acquiring management skills that stood her in good stead in her day job. "I wasn’t interested in purely theoretical learning," says Downing. "I deliberately sought out assignments that would have a practical application in a hospital environment – and my employers appreciated that."

One such assignment helped her develop management tools for quantifying the workloads of different hospital workers – a perennial challenge within the notoriously complex administrative structure of the NHS. Another led to some improved procedures in relation to stem-cell transplants.

Outstanding managers are like gold-dust, whether they are overseeing the expenditure of billions of pounds of money or simply making hospitals run more efficiently, to the benefit of patients. If they need to spend bit of time away from the office studying the art of management, it is generally a sound investment.

Case study: Chiara Dottorini McCormack, 37, a programme manager at ST Micro-Electronics, Bristol, has just completed an MSc in Major Programme Management with the Said Business School in Oxford.

"I took my first degree at the University of Milan, moved to England and have been working for my present company, ST Micro-Electronics in Bristol, for just over ten years. I am both a team leader and a major programme manager, in charge of developing a software programme costing millions of pounds.

“The main reason I wanted to take a masters degree was to acquire new skills and competences that would both help me deliver the current programme successfully and further my long-term career. I discussed options with various business schools and universities and, after careful consideration, ruled out the MBA option. Too much of the content of MBA programmes dealt with broad-brush strategic issues that were not relevant to my career. I wanted something more targeted, concentrating on the practicalities of financing a major programme rather than on the kind of financial issues that dominate the banking world.

“The Said Business School’s MSc in Major Programme Management was perfectly tailored to my needs. I had to meet the costs of the course myself, as my company does not fund such courses for its employers as a matter a policy, but it has been money well spent. It has been hard work at times – I was told I would need to devote about ten hours a week to the course, but seem to have spent closer to fifteen – but the content was first-class, both challenging and focussed.

“As well as studying from home, I had to come to Oxford every two or three months for an intensive four-day session of classes and seminars with fellow students on the course. They were an interesting lot, ranging in age from thirty to fifty, and it was useful to swap experiences with other major programme managers, even ones working in different fields to me. Informal get-togethers in the evening were often as productive as the classes themselves.

“The final element of the course was a dissertation on a subject of our choice. I chose a general topic, major programme success, rather than something specific to my company, but the course as a whole has certainly benefited me in my day-to-day work, notably in re-engineering the software of the company.

“As for the future, I am certainly far more marketable, now that I have got a masters degree under my belt, and the feedback from recruiters has been very positive. But there have been other benefits, too. The course has opened my mind to more strategic ways of looking at old problems. It has given me far greater self-confidence in dealing with people in senior management positions. Last but not least, in putting me in touch with other high-level professionals in other fields, it has significantly broadened my horizons."

Case study: Henk Nagel, 38, Director of Professional Services, Northern Region, for the software company CommVault, is doing an Msc in Management with Ashridge Business School

"I took my first degree in information technology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and am now based in the same city, working for CommVault, a multinational software company. I used to be director of customer services, which was when I acquired my interest in management as a vital tool for a company striving to improve its overall performance.

"In view of my executive responsibilities, it seemed a good idea to acquire a masters degree of some kind, so I weighed my options carefully.

“The problem with a traditional MBA, as I established through discussions with a colleague, is that its content was likely to be overly academic. I wanted a course with a more practical application to my working environment, where a lot of day-to-day problems have a high technical content.

“I had done a short internship with Ashridge Business School in 2009 and been impressed with the standard of their teaching and with their practical approach to management problems. In 2010, with the support of my employers, who agreed to pay half my fees, I enrolled in Ashridge’s new virtual Masters in Management. There was supposed to be a few days’ face-to-face teaching in the first part of the programme, but Ashridge waived this in view of the time I had already spent at the business school. I appreciated their flexibility.

“I have now completed the first element of the masters degree, a three-term postgraduate certificate. There were three separate modules, each taking three months and involving two distinct assignments. It was a significant time commitment – around 15 to 20 hours a week, studying at home in the evenings and at weekends – and with a wife and two young children, I had to manage my time very carefully. Luckily, that is a skill I have always had. Without it, I think I would have struggled.

“Mainly, I was working on my own. There was some scope for interacting with fellow course members through learning groups and on social media sites, but the Ashridge course focuses on individual rather than group assignments, and that suited me fine. I work in quite a specialist field, with challenges specific to it.

“Even though I have only completed the first part of the course, I have already been able to reap the benefits at work. The services side of a company like ours tends to be seen more as a cost rather than as a potential source of profit. I hope that, by analysing our operations in a different way, I have been to improve our bottom-line performance.

“As I move on to the two remaining parts of the course, the three-term diploma and the special project, I want to broaden my horizons into general management and achieve a greater comfort level when dealing with issues of strategy and finance."